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Pope Francis’ White Non-Apology Tour
As a survivor of a fundamentalist Catholic cult, I’d like to put the core issues with Pope Francis’ Canadian “apology tour” into plain terms.
I was 14 when my mother took my sisters and me to the rural town of Saint Marys, Kansas, to sequester us in a space safe from what she called “the evils of the world”. Saint Mary’s was one “parish” in a more extensive network of churches run by the Society of Saint Pius X, an organization that claims to be the last remnant of the one true Catholic Church. During my time in Saint Marys in the 1990s, SSPX leadership made these claims loudly and frequently, completely unbothered that the mainstream Catholic Church headed by the Pope didn’t recognize them as Catholic.
The Pope’s rejection was, in fact, a badge of honor. I spent my high-school years with teachers who believed that the mainstream Catholic church had become too tolerant of other religions and too loose in its definitions of acceptable behaviors for Catholics. Eastern forms of meditation, which had become more accepted in the modern Church, were to be avoided at all costs, as they could lead to demonic possession. Real Catholics, they claimed, should listen only to Classical music, sacred music rooted in Catholicism, and folk songs from Europe and the United States. Popular music that used the rhythms of uncivilized, undisciplined savages would tempt good…
